In this paper, we use the investment fraud of Bernard Madoff to inquire into the production of trust in the context of financial markets. Drawing upon empirical data related to U.S. individual investors (interviews and letters) as well as documentary material, we investigate the mechanisms...

Regulation and subsequent deregulation significantly affect firms’ debt decisions. Prior to deregulation, regulated firms depend significantly more on long-term and public debt but reduce this dependence considerably during deregulation. Cross-sectional analysis shows that the reduction in the...

In 1997, France Télécom, the French telecommunications firm, went through a partial privatization or Opening of Shareholding. As part of this process, the government offered current and prior France Télécom employees the opportunity to buy portfolios of shares with various combinations of...

Existing theories of the term structure of swap rates provide an analysis of the Treasury-swap spread based on either a liquidity convenience yield in the Treasury market, or default risk in the swap market. While these models do not focus on the relation between corporate yields and swap rates...

The position of an internal audit function as a “servant of two masters” (i.e. management and the audit committee) may lead to a conflict of priorities. In this setting, the tone at the top set by the Chief Audit Executive (CAE) plays a critical role in balancing the potentially competing...

Political activism positively affects firm innovation. Firms that support more politicians, politicians on Congressional committees with jurisdictional authority over the firms’ industries and politicians who join those committees innovate more. The authors employ instrumental variables...

This paper develops and tests new theory about the determinants of value creation in unrelated multibusiness firms from a resource-based perspective. The authors argue that the availability of "headquarter resources", which are at the basis of headquarter services provided to the business units,...

In a context of development of international capital markets, it seems to be interesting to question the adaptation of French groups to Anglo-American practices. The objective of the present paper is to illustrate the evolution towards the Anglo-American standards through the study of one aspect...

In this study we re-examine the pricing of equity and the risk incentives of shareholders in levered firms. We derive a down-and-out call equity valuation model which rests on the assumption that shareholders choose the optimal investment and asset returns' volatility as a function of current...

By focusing on the highly innovative retail market for structured products, we investigate the drivers of financial complexity. We perform a lexicographic analysis of the term sheets of 55,000 retail structured products issued in Europe since 2002. We observe that financial complexity has been...